In March this year, I wrote that the newly-elected (then acting) government had to "urgently address two most important problems: the military Russian invasion that [had] already started in the Crimea, the southernmost region of Ukraine, and the dire economic situation". Writing at the end of this year, Karatnycky argues that Ukraine's established government is relatively successfully dealing with these two problems: "Ukraine is intelligently addressing its key challenges: restructuring the national budget to avoid default and meeting the military threat posed by Russia".

At the same time, Karatnycky highlights another problem, namely "independently operating warlords and armed groups", some of which are guided by far right ideology, as well as the cooperation between these groups and Ukraine's Minister of Interior Arsen Avakov - the cooperation that I have briefly discussed here.

The pro-Putin United Russia party formed its first parliamentary majority after the 2003 elections. Putin took this opportunity to modify the electoral law to marginalise minor parties in the next elections and strengthen the major parties and, in particular, the United Russia. These changes helped the United Russia to win enough seats in the 2007 parliamentary elections to form a constitutional majority. Since Orbán’s party Fidesz returned to power after the 2010 parliamentary elections, he has moved swiftly to consolidate it. Amid the popular disappointment with the previous, Socialist-led government that failed to effectively tackle the 2008 financial crisis, Fidesz and its minor coalition partner Christian Democratic People’s Party secured two-thirds of the seats in the parliament. Forming a parliamentary majority allowed them to modify the country’s constitution, including the electoral law, in 2012. The electoral reform helped Orbán retain the constitutional majority after the 2014 elections.

15 December 2014

Readers of this blog may have heard of the Center for Eurasian Strategic Intelligence (CESI) that seems to promote a "hawkish" view on Russia's foreign policy. In his Twitter, Edward Lucas has recently raised doubts about the authenticity of this organisation, and, as I found out, for a good reason. Let's have a closer look at CESI.

12 December 2014

Ukraine’s early presidential and parliamentary elections earlier this year proved to be disastrous for the Ukrainian party-political far right.

Oleh Tyahnybok, the leader of the All-Ukrainian Union “Freedom” (Svoboda), obtained 1.16% of the vote in the presidential election, while his party secured only 4.71% of the vote in the parliamentary election and, eventually, failed to pass the 5% electoral threshold and enter the parliament. In comparison, Svoboda obtained 10.44% of the votes in 2012 and formed the first ever far right parliamentary group in Ukraine’s history. Dmytro Yarosh, the leader of the Right Sector, obtained 0.70% in the presidential election, and 1.80% of the voters supported his party in the parliamentary election.

However, the electoral failure of Svoboda and the Right Sector did not mark “the end of history” of the Ukrainian far right, and some other developments proved to be much more problematic. One of these developments is the rise of the previously obscure neo-Nazi organisation “Patriot of Ukraine” (PU) led by Andriy Bilets’ky.